Thursday, January 9, 2014

By George 3

George Weigel

Let me come back to George Weigel’s book Evangelical
Catholicism.I had begun to discuss this
in a number of earlier entries (November 19, 20, and 22nd 2013). To
recap, Weigel credits contemporary Catholicism as finding its roots in the
vision of Pope Leo XIII, a pope who very much—in his day—engaged the (then)
modern world and its questions and issues.And, appropriate to his ministry, Leo brought the rich theological
heritage of our Catholic faith into the dialogue.Leo is probably best remembered for his
startling encyclical, Rerum Novarum,
which for its day was every bit as “radical” as the recent papal letter, Evangelii Gaudium.I think Weigel fudges his history a bit—or
rather paints the picture with strokes so broad as to be inaccurate in some
details—but I think he is on to something in his thesis.(My objections would center mostly in that I
don’t see Pius X and his pontificate as standing in continuity with Leo (his
predecessor) or with Benedict XV and Pius XI, his successors.But I am willing to let the point pass.)I am very much taken, however, by Weigel’s
vision of an Evangelical Catholicism that anchors Catholic life in taking the
Word of God to bear in our daily lives and nourishing ourselves by fully
participating in the sacramental life of the Church.Indeed, I think it was this immersion in Word
and Sacrament that gave us the Second Vatican Council and especially its
Liturgy.The spiritual energy of places
like Maria Laach and Beuron Abbey, Saint Séverin in Paris and Combermere in
Ontario, the witness of people like Edith Stein and Dorothy Day and the
Dominican friar Jacques Loew, and the scholarship of Josef Jungmann, Augustin
Bea, and Marie-Dominique Chenu all reflect this spirituality of Word and
Sacrament and all provided the resources from which the Council Fathers were
able to imagine a new and renewed Churchthat could project in our day and in our world the enthusiasm with which
the Apostles propagated the Gospel in theirs.

At the same time that this tremendous energy was
flooding the Church, the world around the Church—or at least the European and
American worlds—were falling into a post-Christian culture that would present
the Church with an incredible challenge but one which we could meet
strengthened by these resources of revived engagement with the Word of God and
Sacramental Life.The problems that
prompted Leo to write Rerum Novarum—the
sordid view of the Robber Baron Capitalists that the human person is no more
than a tool to be used to make money—threated industrial societies with the
grossest dehumanization.Nihilism, the
cynical philosophical system that swept away any idea of a moral compass by
which the industrialists, the wealthy classes, and the State should be governed
in their relationship with the masses, devoured whatever soul remained in
Western society after the rise of secularism consequent to the “Enlightenment”
and the Revolution it spawned.The
emergence of Leninism/Stalinism in Russia and its devaluation of the human
individual in favor of the State as well as the rise of National Socialism with
its dehumanization of the individual and its repugnant racial ideology were the
results of this collapse of humanistic thought.

In the face of this implosion of civilization,
Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular had the resources to
provide an alternative view in which the human person retained his or her worth
as a being and not dependent on the usefulness of the individual to society or to the state.Catholic philosophers such as Paul Claudel, Etienne
Gilson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and
Gabriel Marcel presented philosophies in which the human person, far from being
a tool of the State or having no intrinsic value, is the raison d’etre of being, the very center of existence for whose sake
and good interest society exists.

The philosophic debate is not over.In the post-World War II period, secularism
has espoused and advanced a philosophy in which there is no concept of the
common good but in which ethics are guided by self-interest of the individual.The impact of Ayn Rand, the doyenne of this
school of radical self-interest, has transformed American society (and not, to
my mind, for the better.)American society today would seem to recognize
no good that trumps the self-interest of the individual.We are left with a “trickle-down economics” that
sees the gap between a rich minority and an ever-poorer and growing majority
increasing by the year. In 2009, the average
salary of a CEO was 263 times that of the average American worker, a situation
every bit as evil as that against which Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum.Americans are
obsessed with alleged personal rights whether it is the right to possess
firearms or the right to have an abortion.We find our chief form of entertainment in the vicarious disposal of
human life through media ranging from movies through television to video games
for youth and consider this to be our “right.”We perceive pornography—whether sexual or violence—to be a “victimless
crime.”The family is in shreds because “I
don’t want to be married anymore” is sufficient cause—again the triumph of the
selfish individual—to overturn commitments of marriage and parenthood.Both “the left” and “the right” have bought
into this heresy of “it’s all about me and my happiness.”

The
antidote to this moral chaos is Weigel’s Evangelical Catholicism.It is a revived commitment to a scriptural
spirituality in which, as one medieval spiritual text explains:Let the Sword of the Spirit, that is the Word of God,
dwell in your minds and in your hearts that all that you do may be done in the
Word of the Lord. What has been the
genius of evangelical voices throughout the history of Christianity has been
this call to “hear the Word of God and put it into practice.” (cf Luke
11:28).

The
error that I see Weigel making is not in his vision of Evangelical Christianity
but in his understanding of how it is to be presented.He sees it as a bastion against the
philosophical/moral chaos of post-modern society.He wants Christians to use their clout to
contain and suppress this modern heresy of an “ethics” of self-interest.He falls into the same error our bishops have
fallen into these past thirty some years since Roe vs. Wade: change laws and
everything will be alright.But if Weigel knew the scriptures himself he
would know that the mission God gave to the prophets and Jesus gave to his
disciples is to change hearts.It is a
far more challenging mission to change hearts than to change laws, but it is the
only path that will bring success.I am
all in favor of Evangelical Catholicism but it must be, well, evangelical—you
know—evangelizing.I
remember thirty years ago I was part of a committee a young priest was trying
for form in our parish.It was an
evangelism committee—an attempt to evangelize our neighborhood in which many
had fallen away from the faith and even more had never had it.At the end of the organizational meeting a
wise old nun (yes, an LCWR nun) who had served as novice mistress in her
community observed: “ok, fine, but who will evangelize us so that we can go and
evangelize the neighborhood?”Yes, who
will evangelize us?I think Weigel makes
an important contribution to this task but he needs to go back and re-read
those scriptures.

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About The Man Behind the Curtain

Welcome to "What Sister Never Knew and Father Never Told You." I have always had a passion for history, and Church History (or, as it is better termed "The History of the Church") and in this blog I hope to bring up interesting--and frequently deliberately overlooked--facets of the history of the Catholic Church. I will probably also dip into the history of other Christian Churches from time to time and even that of non-Christian religions, but I do hope to keep my focus on the History of the Catholic Church. I am particularly anxious to show that the Catholic faith--which while doctrine tells us "comes from the Apostles" (and presumably to them from Jesus) is in fact, like all historical institutions, an evolutionary phenomenon. There is a huge difference between Tradition and traditions,. What many"Traditionalists" are caught up with today is not Tradition at all but various minor customs of human origin and little or no theological significance. As a Catholic myself, I am anxious to separate the wheat of the Gospel from the chaff of religiosity.

I am a life-long Catholic and a professional historian (M.A., Ph.D) who also has a Master's in Theology. My grade school (Sisters of Mercy), high-school (Society of Jesus), and undergrad university (Society of Jesus) education is all in official Catholic, Kennedy Directory listed, educational Institutions as is the Grad School where I earned my Theology Degree. My History Degrees, Master's and Doctorate, are from a private East Coast University (where Jews teach Christianity to atheists) that ranks in the top one-hundred American Colleges and Universities lists. I chose a secular campus for my history work precisely so that I could not be accused of having done an "in-house" educational program. As it worked out I had one Catholic professor for one course and that course was "The History of Islam." I currenlty teach on a graduate faculty and specialize in medieval spirituality (of which I am not only a professor but a practioner) and in History of the American Church. I have also been invited around the English Speaking World to give classes and workshops--England, Ireland, Australia, Kenya, Zimbabwe, India, and Texas (among other places). I have spoken at conferences in Rome, Sao Paulo, Nantes, Krakow and other non-Anglophone locations in Europe and the Americas. I have done lecture tours on a prominent cruise line commeting on European History and the various ports of call--a great job if you can get it. In other words, I am not an amateur at this.

I am thoroughly committed to the program of the SecondVatican Council as it was promulgated in 1965 (as contrasted with how it has been reinterpreted, in some cases almost out of existence) by both self-appointed and divinely anointed authorities over the last thirty-some years. As I get older I realize that the Council is an opportunity for us Catholics to embrace the Gospel as the guiding light of our lives and is toogreat an opportunity to be bypassed by those who are anxious to see a revival of the juridicism, triumphalism, and clericalism decried by Bishop Emil de Smedt in the opening session of the Council. There are those "fleshpots of Egypt Catholics" who want to retreat to the slavery of pre-conciliar American Catholicism," but as for me, I still believe that John XXIII (and Pius XII before him and Paul VI after him) saw a promised land of a mature and evangelical Catholicism so needed in the 21st century and I for one embrace the future, not the past.

By the way, historians are those who embrace the future and realized that the past is there to guide us toward it. Those who embrace the past and seek to restore it are antiquarians. Christians know that we stand facing the future for that is from where the Kingdom of God calls us. Those who prefer restoring the past have not yet heard that call. Or, as one spiritual director once told me: "If God had wanted you to live in the 13th century (or the 18th, or the first half of the twentieth) he would have put you there. He put you in the present facing the future.That is where your vocation is."